John The Other debates John The Other on MRA misogyny, loses

There were a lot of ridiculous answers to that question, but one of the most ridiculous (and one of the most highly upvoted) responses came from our old friend John Hembling, the blabby Canadian videoblogger and A Voice for Men “Editor in Chief” also known for some dopey reason as John The Other. He explained:

Really, John? Because I have something like 1200 posts on this blog here that would seem to suggest that, no, a lot of MRAs (and PUAs and MGOTWers) really, honestly, sincerely, and sometimes even proudly, hate women. (Ok, a certain percentage of my posts are actually about kitties, but still, I invite you to spend a month or so going through the archives, John; you may learn a thing or two.)

But, actually, there’s no need to take my word on the subject. Because if you really want to know why so many people think MRAs hate women, I invite you to take a look at and a listen to this video by a prominent MRA. Seems pretty obvious that this guy hates women, wouldn’t you agree?

Oh, by the way, this guy is you. [TRIGGER WARNING for people who are not John Hembling and who might be disturbed by a smirking asshole literally laughing about rape. Seriously. This is bad even by his standards.]

Oh, another by the way: Hembling complained about feminists “doxing” him long after he made the video that was excerpted here in which he gave out his name. That’s right, he put his name out in his own video, then complained that feminists were violating his privacy and basically terrorizing him by ever mentioning his name. Until he started going by his real name again.

Huh. MRAs certainly have a most unusual way of “walking on eggshells.” Indeed, to this outside observer it looks a lot less like “walking on eggshells” and more like “angry toddler having an endless stompy tantrum.”

More importantly, you missed my point. I’m saying physical data and all the rest of the “scientifically measurable” stuff isn’t relevant. It’s not going to be able to measure this, it doesn’t touch it. Saying that makes something untrue is a pretty damn big jump unless you insist that what we know physically now is all there is to know, and that such measurements are the only things that matter.

I believe what I experience is true. I have no way of presenting evidence that would satisfy someone for who this material world is all there is. That doesn’t mean I don’t care whether it’s true or not; I do, very much, because my life with Louis matters a fuckton more than most other things in my life. But I’m not about to decide “Oh well, it can’t be true” simply because it doesn’t chime in with the physical sciences, let alone basing its importance on those.

How is it an impossible standard? It’s perfectly possible, given the existence of God-like being. Would you care to offer an explanation of why the Bible needs to be interpreted? Is it because God didn’t know what would happen if an ambiguous Bible was written? Is it because God can’t do anything about it? Or is it because God doesn’t care if we little ants slaughter each other by the millions over different interpretations of the Bible? Which of the Os do you want to drop?

And the standard is not arbitrary. It directly follows from the ascribed attributes of God. Note that I did not say anything about non-triple-O deities. The fact that Greek myths, for example, are inconsistent says nothing about their truth value because no one claims that those deities are omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.

The standard is arbitrary because you fuckin’ made it up. There was no reason it was necessary on any level except as a stick for you to use to beat religious people with. And you’ve had to build an enormous stack of assumptions in order for this to make even the least bit of sense (such as that God pretty much sat down and wrote the Bible himself, and that violence wouldn’t happen if it weren’t religiously inspired, and for that matter that anyone here even believes in an omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent deity).

I can’t believe I have to say this, but the Bible is ambiguous because it is written with words. Made up by people. Who are not omniscient. To communicate with each other. As part of a language. Which is not completely free of ambiguity. Because it is spoken by people. People are not perfect at either sending or receiving communication. Therefore ambiguity will always exist.

(And why on earth is this the route you’re going with the omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent argument, anyway? There are so many better tacks.)

I’ve had to argue with singlets before who demand I prove my existence. Oddly, they never seem to like it much when I tell them THEY need to prove their existence to ME. Apparently since I’m the outlier, I’m the one obligated to answer a question they can’t.

Apparently since I’m the outlier, I’m the one obligated to answer a question they can’t.

Consciousness is one of those classic ineffable things. Like whether your senses are reliable; that’s another. But these things are meant to be contemplated on the couch with a joint in one hand and a bowl of chips in the other while going “Whoa, duuuuuude.” They are not meant for being aggressively assholish to people about; I’m sorry that people act that way to you :/

Made up means arbitrary. Right. So all arguments ever made by humans are arbitrary because they were made up.

Could you point out which part of my argument requires that God literally wrote the Bible? Could you point out the part that claims that violence wouldn’t happen if it weren’t religiously inspired? Do you not believe in a triple-o deity? (If you don’t why didn’t you come out with that, like, yesterday. Because then my argument is, admittedly, false.)

As to your second paragraph, no shit sherlock. That’s obvious. That’s what you’d expect if there isn’t a god.

I’m going this route because you wanted to talk about textual interpretation as it pertains to the Bible. Since I’m not trolling, I thought I’d post on that topic, rather than use better arguments.

This is why I think this conversation (that’s been had many times before) is pointless. There’s no possibility of people coming to an agreement, because the underlying way of looking at certain things is too different, and I’m not sure why “OK, so we don’t agree, and your perspective seems as odd to me as mine does to you – pass the bong” isn’t an option.

I can understand where the urge to suggest that if someone thought things through more they’d agree with you comes from, but I also think that it’s a good idea to be aware of how that can come across (and, again, how pointless trying to talk people out of their perspective ultimately is).

I think the next time someone tries to pull that on me, I’m going to do the same thing I did when orion asked what I was, and start claiming how I’m a reincarnation of the Golem of Prague, raised from my atticy grave to fight assholery in the world.

Made up means arbitrary. Right. So all arguments ever made by humans are arbitrary because they were made up.

*facepalm* So much reading comprehension fail. Go back and look at that paragraph again.

By the way, is Cassandra allowed back from her thread exile yet? Because I’m curious as to your justification for ordering her to leave a thread in which you were complaining about people silencing atheists.

I’m not sure why “OK, so we don’t agree, and your perspective seems as odd to me as mine does to you – pass the bong” isn’t an option.

That is my general modus operandi and the reason I pepper my speech with a lot of “IMO” and often reference my own biases. For reals, if I stray from this and start acting like “You MUST believe the thing I believe because it’s true otherwise I wouldn’t believe it!”, I hope people will tell me to knock it off.

Once you’re in this mindset, you can actually have interesting conversations, because you can learn about other people’s beliefs and hear different ideas without the whole thing being polluted with a constant need to PROVE OTHER PEOPLE WRONG!

Nice dodge of the meat of the post. Very impressive. The judges give it a 8/10 although you get marks off for addressing half of the substantive remarks instead of ignoring the first two paragraphs, which go together, entirely.

I’d also like to know where I “ordered” Cassandra to leave the thread. I’ll have to provide that info to tech support when I explain that some weird browser glitch is hiding my comments from me.

For crying out aloud, Nepenthe, you’re doing a great job of ignoring nuance and tone and all the rest of an online conversation here – your comments to Cassandra last night were very much “piss off if you don’t like it” and the fact that three people read ‘em that way says the “Oh, tell me where I said that?” line isn’t convincing. You’re seriously talking like a troll now, and addressing katz as if she is.

And if we’re going with the “if I didn’t literally say those exact words, it didn’t happen” standard of evidence, such that “No one’s stopping you from leaving, you know” isn’t telling someone to leave, then you’re going to have to find a quote where someone literally said “atheists must be silent,” as you claimed about elebenty bajillion times yesterday.

(Disclaimer: It was not literally elebenty bajillion times. I am using a device known as hyperbole.)

When exactly did CassandraSays’ conversational preferences become so important here? If someone came in and whined on and on about how they hate when people post cat videos, would the person who suggested that there’s a wide world of non-cat video threads be yelled at for ordering them to go away?

@ Argenti Aertheri
Oh man, your putting all of that in Excel? Yikes! Is that going to work correctly? I would think you would have to use a database for all of those questions that can have multiple answers since excel is just going to give you one cell per row and column for an answer. Unless all of the possible answers had its own column and everyone had a Y/N possibility for each individual filling out the survey. Holy Moly your giving me data nightmares.

It exported with each answer as a column. In words, not Y/N — I’ve gotten the combinations for each answer worked out (lots of copy and pasting!) and gave it usable headers. And split it into sets of 500 answers since excel keeps spitting on it.

Tomorrow first up will be making a spreadsheet (probably pages in a workbook) for each set of questions, then finding the outliers => trolls. Then maybe I can get to the fun stuff like charts!

@Argenti – yeah, the possum thing had me going WTF? when I saw it. Very golemish.

I’d have expected more people on the blog to tick non-religious beliefs, actually. Right now I can’t recall if I did or not (it was that definition of religious that tripped me up). Also, secular humanist yes, when it comes to things like separation of church and state.

In this country I could probably identify as non-religious because I don’t worship Australian Rules football.

Oh, actually, maybe I want to touch the religion thing, but sort of differently. Who was it who was talking about being a unitarian universalist? I’ve looked at that b/c the whole “we welcome everyone, including atheists” bit sounds cool, but it just seems … really really Christian, in form and structure and culture if not necessarily belief. And sometimes belief: The UU church nearest me is actually a church that’s affiliated both with UU and with the united church of christ; it serves communion, etc.

The fact that Greek myths, for example, are inconsistent says nothing about their truth value because no one claims that those deities are omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.

Which certainly made them more believable to me, back when I was worshipping them. The fact that they might not answer your prayers, or even notice you at all, was well documented.

I’m still not convinced that theist privilege is a thing, because “theist” is such a broad category and extremely heterogeneous. Christian privilege is certainly a thing, and I think everyone else benefits or suffers by how far their views are from the Christian mainstream.

Re: half checked non-religious — I should’ve clarified, that’s half the responses to the question (which was check any), not half of us. So once I account for multiple replies it might be higher. I totally blew getting up early >.<

One thought on the theist priviledge thing, that I’m going to try not Godwin’ing on — Jewish priviledge isn’t really a thing, and the farther you get into things like keeping kosher, the harder it gets to do things like eating in restaurants, at parties, etc.

I’ve looked at that b/c the whole “we welcome everyone, including atheists” bit sounds cool, but it just seems … really really Christian, in form and structure and culture if not necessarily belief.

Our roots are Christian, and we definitely structure our worship in a particularly New England Protestant way, but it really depends on which church you go to (each congregation is self-determining). At my church, we only talk about Jesus on Easter and Christmas, and even then he’s treated like a wise prophet. Believe me, if it felt Christian to me, I wouldn’t go at all. Another congregation I’ve attended has a really Pagan bent, while the congregation in my new neighborhood is pretty heavily Christian. It’s all down to the culture of the congregation. That said, UU is still pretty religious in the sense of having a formal structure and a set of principles and “sources of wisdom”, but the spiritual stuff is left up to the individual.

The UU church nearest me is actually a church that’s affiliated both with UU and with the united church of christ; it serves communion, etc.

The UUA and UCC recently formed a sort of partnership over their shared liberalness, and there are some joint congregations, but it’s not like we’ve adopted their theology across the board or declared ourselves Christian or anything.

I should add that UUs tend to use “prophet” to mean “someone who had something important and world-changing to say”. This includes Jesus and Muhammad and Moses, but also MLK Jr and Rachel Carson. I add this just for clarity.

Sorry, last point on me and UU: the religious elements are pretty much last on the lost of why I go to my church – the fact that they share my politics is top, and the community is second (this is why I don’t really think of myself as a UU – I’m just someone who attends First Parish in Brookline)